Being the Continuing Adventures of a Woman and her Trusty Kayak in New York Harbor, the Hudson River, and Beyond.
(with occasional political rants just to keep things lively!)

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

FREEZE!

On your mark!

Get set!

GO!

now, STOP!

In the bag & ready to freeze!

So, Sunday's paddle was really -- oh, I'll say it even though it sounds a little overblown for a simple Jamaica bay day paddle -- sublime. The weather, the company, the exploration of a couple of places I paddle by all the time, and yes, the brilliant idea of tamales, it all came together in a purely lovely day. Faraway adventures are grand, but sometimes a quiet day on your own home waters is all you need, right?

And for the cherry on the Sunday sundae o' sublimity, we got back with enough daylight to spare that there was time to catch up with the garden. It's just about time to be putting the bed to bed, so I got a start on that. The biggest surprise was one last cucumber, which is astounding since the vines had produced themselves into exhaustion and had, as far as I could see, given up the ghost in September. But there it was. I picked over the tomatoes; all green (except for one that might ripen inside) but as I mentioned in relation to taking green tomatoes to PA with me, TQ got the blight this year & being a good cook, dealt with that by learning some interesting green-tomato recipes. My favorite is a green tomato rice dish, simple enough that I think I can do from memory & was happy to see just enough green tomatoes to make it.

As you can see here, though, the big harvest was the chard. I pulled all of the chard plants up. Last year's overwintering experiment was quite entertaining, a 2nd year chard plant is a very different animal, big and stalky, and it was fun to see, but aside from taking up a whole lot of room & not really producing much in the way of edible leaves, it seemed to be a big draw for aphids, so I'm not repeating. That left me with quite a bit more chard than I would really want to eat in the time chard keeps in the fridge, so I repeated an experiment from a couple of weeks ago (when I'd just overpicked one day) and froze it. I got the procedure off the internet; looks awfully complicated for the 3 little single-serving bags I got out of it, but it's mostly just water & that makes for an easy cleanup (plus a good excuse to mop the floor afterwards).

I do have to say that it would be fun to do this with a vegetable that doesn't shrink to an eight of it's original volume in the processing! Still, it's nice to have a few servings of chard tucked away in the freezer, along with the pesto.